mikebrig writes The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx's Legacy to Humanity (with an introduction by Paula Allman) - Edited by Carmel Vassallo & Clare Thake Vassallo (Malta University Press 2003; ISBN 9909-45-34-09) has been published recently and is available for sale. Anyone interested in Marxism in relation to the social sciences and the arts will surely enjoy reading this book. Contributors include Noel Agius, Rene Camilleri, Peter Mayo, Anthony Spiteri, Stella Borg Barthet, Ivan Callus, Joseph Paul Cassar, Vicki Ann Cremona, Clare and Thake Vassallo.

I have fifty loose copies of my essay 'Global Dominance / Global Resistance' , which forms part of this book, in official format.

If you would like a copy of this essay, I wil be pleased to send it you. Just let me know.

Mike Briguglio
mikebrig@maltanet.net

"A Comment on the Question of Human Rights"

Alain Badiou

[During August and September, Christoph Cox and Molly
Whalen interviewed the French philosopher Alain Badiou
for Cabinet magazine. Shortly before the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cox and
Whalen asked Badiou to clarify his conception of human
rights. Shortly after the attacks, Badiou offered the
following response.]

Take the nearest example: the terrible criminal attack
in New York, with its thousands of casualties. If you
reason in terms of the morality of human rights, you
say, with President Bush: "These are terrorist
criminals. This is a struggle of Good against Evil."
But are Bush's policies, in Palestine or Iraq for
example, really Good? And, in saying that these people
are Evil, or that they don't respect human rights, do
we understand anything about the mindset of those who
killed themselves with their bombs? Isn't there a lot
of despair and violence in the world caused by the
fact that the politics of western powers, and of the
American government in particular, are utterly
destitute of ingenuity and value? In the face of
crimes, terrible crimes, we should think and act
according to concrete political truths, rather than be
guided by the stereotypes of any sort of morality.

"Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism"

Slavoj Zizek

It is as if we are witnessing today the ultimate
confirmation of Freud's thesis, from Civilization and
its Discontents, on how, after every assertion of
Eros, Thanatos reasserts itself with a vengeance. At
the very moment when, according to the predominant
liberal ideology, we are finally leaving behind the
"immature" political passions (the regime of the
"political": class struggle and other "out-dated"
divisive antagonisms) for the post-ideological
"mature" pragmatic universe of rational administration
and negotiated consensus, for the universe, free of
utopian impulses, in which the dispassionate
administration of social affairs goes hand in hand
with the aestheticized hedonism (the pluralism of
"ways of life"), -- at this very moment, the foreclosed
political is celebrating a triumphant comeback in its
most archaic form of pure, undistilled racist hatred
of the Other which renders the rational tolerant
attitude utterly impotent.

Matteo Pasquinelli writes:

"Radical Machines Against Techno-Empire"

Matteo Pasquinelli

Deleuze and Guattari took the machine out of the factory, now it is up to us to take it out of the network and imagine a post-internet generation.

        Everyone of us is a machine of the real, everyone of us is a constructive machine. -- Toni Negri



        Technical machines only work if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction.-- Gilles Deluze, Felix Guattari, L'anti-Oedipe
 

What is knowledge sharing? How does the knowledge economy function? Where is the general intellect at work? Take the cigarettes machine. The machine you see is the embodying of a scientific knowledge into hardware and software components, generations of engineering stratified for commercial use: it automatically manages fluxes of money and commodities, substitutes a human with a user-friendly interface, defends private property, functions on the basis of a minimal control and restocking routine. Where has the tobacconist gone? Sometimes he enjoys free time. Other times the company that owns the chain of distribution has replaced him. In his place one often meets the technician. Far from emulating Marx's "Fragment on Machines" with a Fragment on cigarette machines, this unhealthy example is meant to show how postfordist theories live around us and that material or abstract machines built by collective intelligence are organically chained to the fluxes of the economy and of our needs.

Francisco Trindade writes:

A Apologia de Proudhon

Francisco Trindade

A nova obra de Francisco Trindade distribuída exclusivamente em formato digital através do site

www.franciscotrindade.com

Se estiver interessado em adquirir a obra A Apologia de Proudhon terá que preencher um formulário (que se encontra em www.franciscotrindade.com)
indicando nome ou alcunha e o mais importante para mim apesar de ser facultativo,
o motivo ou as razões que o levam a pedir uma cópia do livro.
Preço da obra A Apologia de Proudhon: 0 euros.

"Hieroglyphs of the Future:

Jacques Rancière and the Aesthetics of Equality"

Brian Holmes

"We're not surplus, we're a plus." The slogan appeared at the demonstrations
of the French jobless movement in the mid-nineties, in journals, on banners,
on tracts printed by the political art group Ne pas plier. It knitted the
critical force and the subjective claims of the movement into a single phrase.
To be "surplus" (laid off, redundant) was to be reduced to silence in a
society that effectively subtracted the jobless from the public accounts, that
made them into a kind of residue -– invisible, inconceivable except as a
statistic under a negative sign. Excluded, in short: cut out of a system based
on the status of the salaried employee. Until they finally came together to
turn the tables, reverse the signs, and claim a new name on a stage they had
created, by occupying unemployment offices in a nation-wide protest during the
winter of 1997-98. The people with nothing erupted onto the public
scene. "We're a plus," they said, intruding through the TV cameras into the
country's living rooms. Which also meant, "We'll drink champagne on Christmas
eve."

One way to grasp the aesthetic language of the French social movements in the
nineties -– and of the transnational movements now emerging -– is to read
Jacques Rancière's work on equality.

The Cornelius Castoriadis/Agora International Website has new materials available for teaching Castoriadis.
agorainternationa

alejo writes

..... Since long i have been a reader of the interactivist, i wanted to let people know about this place in the switz alps that gathers people like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Bruce Sterling, Judith Butler and many more. Its a very open and unique place so place check the url and judge for yourself,

best/,br>
alejo

http://www.egs.edu"

"Anarchism and Poststructuralism"


Paul Nursey-Bray

"Conventional anarchism relies too heavily upon
categories that are politically and epistemologically
suspect. These include scientific discourse, humanism
and rationalist semiotics. As long as anarchists
continue to employ this suspect thinking it is
extremely unlikely that they will be able to develop a
revolutionary theory or praxis that will provice
meaningful challenges either to capitalism or the
state apparatus that sanctions that economic system". -- Lewis Call

There have been a number of attempts in recent year to
achieve a meld of anarchism and poststructuralism.
These attempts have been based on perceived
similarities between the two bodies of theory,
particularly with respect to the iconoclastic approach
of anarchism to the state, authority and accepted
norms, and its proposal, as an alternative to
centralised power, of diffused networks of local
empowerment.

"Bombs and Bytes"

Anustup Basu, metamute

Fascism without a Fuhrer? During the build up of support for the war
on Iraq, no functionary of the US government publically stated that
Saddam Hussein had an active role in the devastation of September 11,
2001. Nevertheless, an alarming number of Americans believed that the
Iraqi despot was involved in the conspiracy and its execution.
Anustup Basu looks beyond the big lie, to show how information itself
short-circuits knowledge.

INTRODUCTION

During the publicity drive towards building up domestic and international
support for the 2003 war on Iraq, no functionary of the United States
government actually made a public statement to the effect that Saddam Hussein
had an active part to play in the devastation of September 11, 2001.
Nevertheless, it was subsequently noted in the opinion polls that an alarming
number of American people believed that the Iraqi despot was involved in the
conspiracy and its execution. Hence the two propositions -– Saddam the evil
one, and 9/11, the horrible crime -– seem to be associated in a demographic
intelligence without having any narrative obligation to each other; that is,
without being part of the same ‘story’. The outcome, it seems, was achieved by
a mathematical chain of chance, by which two disparate postulates, in being
publicised with adequate proximity, frequency, and density, gravitate towards
each other in an inhuman plane of massified thought. They, in other words, are
bits and bytes of newspeak which have come to share what I will call
an ‘informatic’ affinity with each other, without being organically conjoined
by constitutive knowledge. The formation of the latter entity is of course
something we are prone to consider a primary task of the philosophical human
subject, who is also the modern citizen with rights and responsibilities.